Onavo: How Meta Used a VPN App as Corporate Spyware

In 2013, Facebook acquired Onavo, an Israeli company that offered a free VPN app marketed as a data-saving and privacy tool. What users didn't know was that Onavo routed all their mobile internet traffic through Meta's servers, giving the company unprecedented visibility into how users interacted with competing apps. This data powered some of Meta's most consequential strategic decisions, including the acquisitions of WhatsApp and the development of features designed to neutralize competitors — a corporate espionage operation disguised as a consumer privacy product.

The Surveillance Mechanism

Onavo Protect, the consumer-facing app, offered users free VPN protection and data compression. In exchange, all of the user's mobile internet traffic — every app they used, every website they visited, every service they accessed — was routed through servers Meta controlled. This gave Meta detailed intelligence on which apps were growing, what features users engaged with, and which competitors posed the greatest threat to Facebook's dominance. The data was analyzed by Meta's strategic intelligence team and used to inform acquisition decisions and feature development.

Strategic Intelligence in Action

Onavo data directly influenced Meta's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp. Meta's analysis of Onavo traffic revealed that WhatsApp was growing faster than any other messaging app and was becoming the primary communication tool in markets Meta considered strategically important. The data showed exactly how much time users spent in WhatsApp versus Facebook Messenger, what features drove engagement, and which demographics were shifting to WhatsApp. This intelligence allowed Meta to justify the historically high acquisition price and to identify WhatsApp as an existential threat before the market broadly recognized it.

Apple removed Onavo from the App Store in 2018 for violating data collection policies, and Meta subsequently shut down the app. But the company continued similar research programs through other means, including Facebook Research, an app distributed outside the App Store that paid users $20 per month for comprehensive device monitoring access — essentially paying for the surveillance data it had previously collected through Onavo without compensation.

The Onavo episode illustrates how Meta's acquisition strategy is informed by surveillance of user behavior across competitors' products. When Meta cannot acquire a competitor, it uses intelligence from these programs to build competing features — a strategy that has drawn antitrust scrutiny from regulators who view it as using monopoly power to identify and neutralize competitive threats.